About

The Gothic Imagination is based at the University of Stirling, Scotland and provides an interdisciplinary forum for lively discussion and critical debate concerning all manifestations of the Gothic mode. Queries to Dr Timothy Jones on timothy.jones@stir.ac.uk.

2008 April

ITV are currently showing Season 1 of the US TV show Dexter. Even if quasi-police dramas set in Miami that feature serial-killer protagonists don't sound like your usual cup of tea, I'd strongly recommend this one.
Dexter Morgan is a forensics officer in a Miami police department, the adopted son of a policeman who found him at a crime scene as a toddler. He has a good relationship with his sister (also in the police force) and most of his colleagues, and with his girlfriend and her two small children. He's also a serial killer and a sociopath, trained by his adopted father to channel his urg

Gottfried Benn’s morbid poetry
Little Aster
A drowned drayman was humped on to the slab.
Someone or other had jammed a dark light violet
aster
between his teeth.
And as I, working
with a long knife
under the skin from the breast
cut out tongue and gums,
I must have knocked it for it slid
into the adjacent brain.
I tucked it into his breast cavity for him
between the cotton wads
as he was being sewn up again.
Drink your fill in your vase!
Rest in peace
Little aster!
Beauty and cruelty, existence and death, nihilism.
Gottfried Benn’s po

I’ve been nurturing a fascination for Playboy Magazine, or, more precisely (as the old joke goes) a fascination for the fiction. Curiously, since the first issue in 1953 through to the late 1960s, Playboy published a great number of Gothic tales, many of them subsequently anthologized in The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural (1967). This naturally prompts a number of questions: why Gothic fiction? Why does an aesthetically middle-brow publication known primarily for its glossy images of corn-fed, semi-clad, girl next door types include tales of horror and distress? There are

Fashioning Postmodern/Postcolonial Bodies
The deadline for abstracts is: 30 May 2008
The call for papers may also be found at
http://www.conferencealerts.com/seeconf.mv?q=ca1x0ssa
Westminster University
5-6 September 2008
Call for Papers
We are seeking papers exploring the intersections of fashion and text/film in
postmodern/postcolonial cultures. Possible topics include (but are not limited
to):
. Hybridity
. Parody
. Performativity
. Size 0
. Cyberpunk
. Simulation
. &

We have just opened a Gothic reading group here in Edinburgh. We will be considering texts from different centuries, and in a very Gothic, transgressive way, we will be switching back and forth in time in order to get a taste of the various styles of the genre. We welcome any student who lives in Edinburgh and would like to join the group. For further information email Ilse Marie Bussing Click here to email this user

About

The Gothic Imagination is based at the University of Stirling, Scotland and provides an interdisciplinary forum for lively discussion and critical debate concerning all manifestations of the Gothic mode. Queries to glennis.byron@stir.ac.uk or dale.townshend@stir.ac.uk